“Carbon Creek”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga and Dan O’Shannon and Chris Black
Directed by James Contner
Season 2, Episode 2
Production episode 027
Original air date: September 25, 2002
Date: April 12, 2152
Captain’s star log. Archer, T’Pol, and Tucker are celebrating T’Pol’s one-year anniversary serving on Enterprise. The previous record for a Vulcan serving on a human ship was ten days. Archer also asks a question he’s been meaning to pose since noticing something in her service record: at one point during her assignment on Earth, she visited Carbon Creek, Pennsylvania.
T’Pol explains that it was the site of the first contact between humans and Vulcans, which she says happened, not in Bozeman in 2063, but in Carbon Creek in 1957.
She then tells the story of her great-grandmother, T’Mir, who was second-in-command on a survey vessel that was sent to observe Earth following the launch of Sputnik I. However, the ship had a malfunction, and was forced to crash-land. The captain is killed in the crash. They’re in a remote area in Pennsylvania, about six kilometers from a small mining town called Carbon Creek. While they transmitted a distress signal, they have no idea if it was actually sent, and if so, if it was received.
T’Mir and Stron would prefer to remain in hiding in the woods, but Mestral points out that they’ll starve to death before long. They go to Carbon Creek, steal some clothes, using hats and recombing of hair to hide their ears.
Upon realizing they will need local currency to purchase food, Mestral hits on the idea of hustling pool—it’s only geometry, after all—and he makes enough to get them some TV dinners.
Before too long, the three of them are renting a house. T’Mir is working at the bar where Mestral hustled pool, cleaning up the place. Stron is working as a handyman (using Vulcan tech for some of his repairs, making him very much in demand), while Mestral gets a job in the mines.
Mestral spends some time socially with Maggie, the owner of the bar. She’s a single mother, and her son Jack has received a partial scholarship to college. The town has been gathering up a collection to pay the rest of it. While T’Mir disapproves of Mestral’s friendship (and potential romance) with Maggie, she takes a liking to Jack, who is more eager for intellectual pursuits than most of the townsfolk.
When there’s an accident in the mines, Mestral insists on using their advanced technology to save lives. T’Mir and Stron object on the grounds that it’s interfering with humanity’s development, but Mestral points out that these people have become his friends, and he won’t leave them to die. T’Mir relents and helps him secretly rescue them, which most of the people in Carbon Creek chalk up to being some manner of miracle.
Six months after they crashed, a Vulcan vessel finally comes to their rescue, contacting them when they’re three days out. A Tellarite ship heard the distress call, and eventually forwarded it to High Command.
Word gets around quickly that the trio are leaving. Jack informs T’Mir that they haven’t collected enough for his tuition, so he’s going to remain in town, work, try to save money, and apply for the scholarship again. T’Mir decides to grab some Velcro from their crashed ship and sell it to a company in Pittsburgh for large sums of money, which she then leaves in the collection jar for Jack’s college fund.
Mestral announces that he’s staying on Earth, as there’s so much more to learn. T’Mir and Stron both think this is a terrible idea, but eventually support him, informing the Vulcans who rescue them that he, like the captain, died in the crash.
Archer and Tucker are not entirely sure they believe the story, and T’Pol says only that they asked her to tell them a story, which casts doubt on the veracity of the entire tale. But then T’Pol retires to her quarters and takes out a keepsake: T’Mir’s purse that she used in Carbon Creek.
Buy the Book
The City Inside
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The three Vulcans generally avoid using their fancy-shmancy technology while on Earth. The exceptions are Stron sometimes using it to aid in his repair work and Mestral using it to rescue miners. Why the latter gets him rebuked while the former is ignored is left as an exercise for the viewer.
The gazelle speech. Archer gets the whole schmear started when he asks T’Pol about her inexplicable choice of a small town in western Pennsylvania for a vacation spot while she was assigned to Earth.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol has fun trolling Archer and Tucker by being very cagey about whether or not the story she tells of T’Mir, Mestral, and Stron is even true.
Florida Man. Florida Man Has His World Rocked By Secret Vulcan Mission!
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… The Vulcans sent a survey vessel to observe Earth after they launched Sputnik I in 1957. Apparently they sent it out without performing a full maintenance check…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Maggie mistakes an awkward silence brought about by Mestral’s difficulty understanding human body language cues for a romantic moment, and she leans in to kiss him. However, despite his surprise, he does not object to the kiss, either.
In addition, T’Mir changes clothes behind a white sheet, thus making sure to give the viewers a view of her silhouetted naked body.
I’ve got faith…
“I—I was simply surprised. It was—very pleasant.”
“’Pleasant’?”
“Wasn’t that an appropriate response?”
“Well, it’s been a while since I kissed a man, but still, I was hoping it’d be a little more than ‘pleasant’.”
“I did say ‘very pleasant’.”
–Mestral and Maggie discussing the latter’s impulsive kiss of the former.
Welcome aboard. J. Paul Boehmer plays his fourth of six roles on Trek as Mestral. Three of the other five, amusingly enough, are Nazis—in Voyager’s “The Killing Game” two-parter and upcoming on Enterprise in “Zero Hour” and “Storm Front.” He also played One in Voyager’s “Drone” and a Cardassian in DS9’s “Tacking Into the Wind.”
Michael Crawic plays his third of three roles on Trek as Stron. He previously was a founding Maquis in DS9’s “The Maquis, Part I” and a Caatati captain in Voyager’s “Day of Honor.”
David Selburg plays his fourth of four roles on Trek as the Vulcan captain. He played Whelan (in amusing serendipity, that character was an expert in twentieth-century history) in TNG’s “The Big Goodbye,” Syrus in TNG’s “Frame of Mind,” and Toscat in Voyager’s “Caretaker.”
Hank Harris plays Jack, Ann Cusack (sister of John and Joan) plays Maggie, and Jolene Blalock does double duty, playing both T’Pol as usual and the character’s ancestor T’Mir.
Trivial matters: This episode was filmed first in the season because of the extensive location shooting, but obviously had to be aired second, what with “Shockwave, Part II” having a cliffhanger to resolve…
Only three of the opening-credits regulars appear in this one: Scott Bakula, Jolene Blalock, and Connor Trinneer.
Velcro was invented by a Swiss electrical engineer named George de Mestral, who probably never set foot in Pennsylvania in his life, but is also the source of one of the Vulcans’ names. The name is a portmanteau of two French words, velours (for the soft part) and crochet (for the hooks). The patent was granted to de Mestral in 1955 in Switzerland, three years before T’Mir supposedly sold it in Pittsburgh.
Sputnik I was launched on the fourth of October 1957. The 1957 baseball season ended on the 29th of September, with the World Series ending on the tenth of October. The minor-league baseball season ended even earlier. The only possible baseball game that the denizens of Carbon Creek could’ve been listening to on the radio in October 1957 was the World Series between the Yankees and Braves, but neither team had anybody named Wilcox, Ellis, Thompson, or Dixon on their teams.
Frozen TV dinners in 1957 would have had meat in them. There is no explanation as to why the Vulcans, who are vegetarians (Stron and T’Mir roundly reject Mestral’s proposal that they eat a deer they encounter in the woods), eat them. (Maybe they just ate the side veggies and threw the meat out?)
In the original airing of the episode, and on the VHS release, the song playing when T’Mir and Mestral entered the bar was “Crazy Arms” by Ray Price. However, the DVD, Blu-Ray, and international versions, as well as the streaming one currently on Paramount+, instead have “Gently Falls” by Dave Colvin playing.
Mestral also appears in the novels From History’s Shadow and Elusive Salvation, both by Dayton Ward. Both novels involve several twentieth-century Trek characters from such episodes as “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” “Assignment: Earth,” “Little Green Men,” etc.
In the post-finale novel The Romulan War: To Brave the Storm by Michael A. Martin, Tucker and T’Pol are established as having a daughter, who is named T’Mir in tribute to the girl’s great-great-grandmother.
Tucker and Archer insist that first contact between humans and Vulcans was in Bozeman, Montana in 2063, as chronicled in the movie First Contact. Tucker mentions the commemorative statue of Zefram Cochrane on the site that La Forge mentioned in the movie.
Vulcans investigating Earth in the mid-twentieth century will be seen again in Picard’s “Mercy.”
Two TV shows are referenced that were important to Trek. Tucker mentions The Twilight Zone, one of Trek’s forebears in the world of science fiction television that challenged the viewer. Mestral mentions I Love Lucy, which starred Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, whose Desilu Productions produced Trek.
It’s been a long road… “I need to go now—I Love Lucy is on tonight.” Let me start by saying that this is a fun episode, an entertaining little diversion. It’s actually much more successful than the very-similarly-structured Voyager episode “11:59,” which also saw one of the opening-credits regulars playing her own ancestor on a pre-warp-drive Earth.
But there were several little things that bugged me because it just required a little bit of research, and none of the four people credited with writing this episode cared enough to even try. It starts with a baseball game on the radio in October 1957 which couldn’t possibly have happened, continues to the “invention” of Velcro by T’Mir, and concludes with Jack’s entire college odyssey. The middle part is especially frustrating because they did enough research to know that Velcro was invented by a guy named de Mestral, so they gave J. Paul Boehmer’s character that name to spackle it over, but they didn’t bother to do anything else to tie it to reality.
Especially because that entire aspect of the plot was wholly unnecessary, and it’s because the four people writing the episode were thinking in 2002 terms for a story they were writing that took place in 1957.
In 1957, an Ivy-League university’s tuition was $800 a semester. We don’t know what college Jack was going to, but if it was somewhere closer to home like Duqesne University or Penn State, then it would’ve been even less than that. College tuitions started going up in price in the late 1980s, skyrocketed in the 1990s, so in 2002, the plot with Jack would’ve made sense, as college was prohibitively expensive without major financial aid or student loans when the episode was written—but that was not the case in 1957.
Especially since the rent for the place T’Mir, Mestral, and Stron were living in would’ve been less than $100 a month. One week of Mestral’s pay—Pennsylvania coal miners in the 1950s made between $100 and $150 per week—would’ve covered a month’s rent, with plenty left over. Stron’s work as a plumber would’ve paid him about the same as Mestral, plus T’Mir’s lesser wages cleaning up the bar. They weren’t exactly big spenders, and indeed would have only spent what they absolutely needed for support. After six months in Carbon Creek, they would easily have had enough to pay for all of Jack’s tuition, even without the scholarship. So there was absolutely no need for T’Mir to “invent” Velcro (and apparently give her shipmate credit for it, probably because—and this is true to the time—the guys in Pittsburgh wouldn’t have believed a girl invented it).
It’s just frustrating because, these many many nitpicks notwithstanding, this really is a fun episode. Nothing earth-shattering, and it’s Yet Another Alien On Earth Before Official First Contact (latest in a series! collect ‘em all!), but Boehmer and Jolene Blalock do good work together. The former’s curiosity is very well-played—not inappropriately emotional, but simply logical by his own lights—and the latter does a fine job of showing T’Mir undergoing the same journey in an hour that T’Pol has been going on over the last year. Ann Cusack is fun as Maggie, and I especially like Hank Harris’ low-key Jack. Usually when you have someone that thirsty for knowledge portrayed onscreen, they’re overly enthusiastic and nerdy, but Jack is calmer about it, which makes it more likely that T’Mir would come to like him more than most of the other yucky humans. Honestly, the episode doesn’t need Stron at all, and I would’ve been happy to have removed him all together.
Still, it’s a fun episode. Just wish they’d done more than a modicum of research…
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido has three short stories out in June: “A Lovely View,” a tale of Zorro in Zorro’s Exploits, edited by Audrey Parente, from Bold Venture Press; “What You Can Become Tomorrow,” a story that features author Mary Shelley, baseball player Josh Gibson, and NASA scientist Florence Johnson, in Three Time Travelers Walk Into…, edited by Michael A. Ventrella, from Fantastic Books; and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a Super City Cops story in Tales of Capes and Cowls, edited by C.T. Phipps, from Crossroad Press.
I assume it would have been harder to look up baseball information back in 2002 but that’s the most minor of the nitpicks. I assume the Velcro thing is a callback to The Voyage Home and transparent aluminum or whatever.
noblehunter: It really wouldn’t have been. Baseball reference works and magazines were a dime a dozen in 2002, and have been going back to when I was a goofy young baseball fan in the late 1970s. Certainly the fact that, in 1957, the only professional baseball being played in October was the World Series is not arcane knowledge……….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Interesting. I knew they fudged the Velcro invention, but I didn’t realize how much else they got wrong, especially the college tuition thing. I would add that, according to T’Pol, the crash happened during the third week of the survey mission prompted by Sputnik 1‘s launch, so if we assume it took at least a week for the launch to be detected at Vulcan and the ship to be dispatched and reach Earth, then the episode must begin in late October or early November 1957, weeks after the World Series ended.
This wasn’t bad, but I didn’t love it. I guess I’m not a fan of the “cast members playing different characters in a historical flashback” gimmick, though since this was presented as a story T’Pol was telling, we can presume we’re seeing an interpretation of the reality rather than a literal depiction. That could also account for the historical inaccuracies in T’Pol’s narrative.
Mestral was likeable enough, but it kind of annoys me that stories about Vulcans are so often about requiring them to “learn” to be more humanlike. Their way has worked for them for a couple of millennia, so they must be doing something right.
The part that stands out most in my memory was Jay Chattaway’s music during the mine rescue. It seems the Berman-era “wallpaper music” requirement was fading around this time, and ENT’s composers were able to do richer, more melodic scores.
Eh, it was cute and harmless, although I am bothered a bit by aliens interfering with human development by “inventing” velcro. I guess I see it as interfering with the timeline much like the joke in Star Trek IV of Scotty “inventing” transparent aluminum much earlier than would have otherwise happened.
KRAD, why are you counting J. Paul Boehmer playing Nazis twice as three roles? It’s two different characters and if you just want to count his roles as per episode, then “Killing Game” was two separate episodes, much as his ENT season three and season four appearances were two separate episodes. Therefore, he’s appeared in a total of 7 Stat Trek franchise episodes playing 5 different characters.
A neat little episode.
Those Vulcan scientists are simply terrible thieves. They steal clothes from the laundry line, change on the crime scene, and then walk around the town? But then we’ve seen some examples of Enterprise crew going undercover (and there will be some more), and the humans might have been no better from an alien POV …
Regarding the velcro, remember that T’Mir was about to leave Earth. She probably did not know that velcro was already known, and that investor did not bother to find out. Wouldn’t paying for something like that with cash be unusual even for the late 1950s? Shady business, conning the con-man.
Regarding the Vulcan tools, Stron was looking for witnesses before using them. The weapon Mestral used was much more energetic. So the concern about cultural contamination makes sense. Also, I wonder if his favorite customer was trying to flirt with Stron and Stron simply missed that subtext.
But sci-fi writers have no sense of scale. A Vulcan generation would be some 45 years, which isn’t all that outrageous by human standards.
I have the depressing suspicion that a AD 2000 audience would have found the earning power of a blue collar worker back in the Space Age Vs the Grim Darkness of the Third Millennium more impossible to believe in than aliens from another world coming down to Earth and pool-sharking the locals…
– For the record, my working theory is that (unlike Mestral) Stron didn’t bother to tell the boss that he was employing extraterrestrial technology to make his life easier; he strikes me as exactly the sort of fellow with that sort of quiet initiative when it comes to his own comfort.
– Given that this is the STAR TREK universe, it’s entirely possible that T’Mir’s starship was working perfectly when they left Vulcan, but ran into some unforeseen difficulties that did a number on the works (After all, technology making life easier but not necessarily making the Galaxy any safer to explore is a core element of TREK and always has been). (-;
– The ‘curtain dance’ of T’Mir is undoubtedly a little cheesy, but it’s also an excellent build-up to the punchline that she’s put on her dress the wrong way round (Which, given the uniform competence of the lady and her great-great grandaughter is a nice little moment reminding us that they’re not perfect).
– I find it deeply amusing to imagine a much, much older T’Mir being approached after the Bozeman touchdown and politely refusing to be hauled all the way to Earth as a consultant (I wonder if her experiences were formally documented for release to the general public at this time?).
– Pour one out for Mestral, the Vulcan James T. Kirk! (I’d bet that this particular Vulcan would have made an excellent Starfleet officer, had he been born in a different century – I wonder if his story and that of his colleagues is more widely known & accepted by the 23rd & 24th centuries?).
I wonder if the Vulcan expedition to Earth briefly seen in PICARD (Season 2) was an effort to track down Mestral, the secret of his survival having somehow been ferreted out?
Anyway, suffice it to say that this was a nice little change-of-pace episode that I really enjoyed (Especially the gentle reminders that Vulcans are un-emotive, but seldom inhumane … also that they are snarks AND terrible, terrible fibbers).
garreth: I was basing it on Memory Alpha’s listing, which had his two Enterprise Nazis as different characters.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Of course, the Watsonian explanation could be that T’Pol isn’t aware of the nuances of baseball, college tuition, or velcro’s patent history. (For that matter, the whole velcro thing might have been an addition spawned when T’Pol spotted the coincidental name of the inventor and logically-but-incorrectly deduced that it was connected to her great-grandma’s old story.)
And KRAD’s note about Desilu producing Star Trek downplays just how hard Lucille Ball fought to get Trek on the air; this franchise wouldn’t exist without I Love Lucy.
This also marks the beginning of Vulcan’s love of 1950s Earth comedy; Discovery reveals that the house of Sarek are clearly Burns & Allen fans (“Say goodbye, Spock.” “Goodbye, Spock.”).
One thing that always struck me: “Shockwave” was 10 months after Enterprise launched, while “Carbon Creek” is a full year after. So since the “Shockwave” 2-parter only took a matter of days, there’s a time jump of nearly 2 months between consecutive episodes.
@8/Cybersnark: The attribution of that joke to Burns & Allen is a myth; Gracie actually just responded to “Say goodnight, Gracie” with “Goodnight.” It was the hosts of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In who popularized that joke. https://legendsrevealed.com/entertainment/2012/10/22/did-gracie-allen-ever-actually-say-goodnight-gracie/
Didn’t Agent K also state velcro was an alien invention in the original MiB?
Anyway, yes, a fun little episode. Worth it just to hear a Vulcan say the words I Love Lucy in a monotone.
Fun episode. I’m glad Jolene Blalock played T’Pol’s ancestor, because she did a fine job of it.
The Twilight Zone was an important show for sure but more specifically relevant was that right after this episode first aired on UPN there was a brand new episode of The Twilight Zone from executive producer Ira Steven Behr.
I just want to point out that Mestral also appears in Hearts and Minds, which is also by Ward.
@1. noblehunter
I’ve seen comments before suggesting Velcro was another Trek self-reference as Gene Rodenberry reportedly insisted that there be no visible zippers or fasteners in the futuristic Trek costumes. (I also read the costume designer on Enterprise cut loose and put zippers everywhere when given the chance). I agree that it was also a nod to Scotty inventing “transparent aluminum” in Star Trek: The Voyage Home. The episode itself has so many deliberate references to City on the Edge of Forever too.
I do understand the annoyance at the writers not checking the baseball details, they clearly should have checked Grays Sports Almanac. I think the Velcro contrivance can be easily explained in several ways, for one as a mere narrative liberty to tell the story, but as Keith has suggested that wasn’t even necessary, they probably had savings to spare. I’d also have also thought selling scrap gold or other base metal (maybe even synthetic diamonds or any sort of inert crystal) from the crashed ship would be a relatively easy way to generate currency.
Another in-universe way to explain the choice of Velcro is that maybe T’Mir knew full well that it had been invented in Switzerland in 1955 (I wont get into the major differences between US patents and European patents, it gets complicated fast) and she was exploiting the fact that it would not have been widely known in US until later. It wasn’t until 1958 that Time magazine wrote about the new invention: A Brief History of: Velcro – TIME
One of my favourite episodes. I really liked the “I Love Lucy” reference especially.
Yeah, but the whole reason why one of the Vulcans was named Mestral is because the inventor of velcro was named de Mestral, and they were trying to be cute and showing that he was really a Vulcan, except they didn’t actually do the work to make that in any way plausible…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
A nitpick on the episode: The Twilight Zone debuted on October 2, 1959, although a pilot of sorts, The Time Element, appeared on the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse on November 24, 1958. I think that’s a research mistake equally bad as missing the World Series, especially for a science fiction TV program.
And two nitpicks for Keith: I have no idea how close Carbon Creek was supposed to be to Pittsburgh. If they said so in the episode, I don’t remember it. But in the late 1950s, Penn State wouldn’t have been considered very close to Pittsburgh because of the poor roadway system that led from western Pennsylvania to the center of the state. Also, Duquesne is spelled with two “u”s, not one.
There is a short story featuring Mestral in the anthology Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 9. Its name is, appropriately enough, “Mestral.”
17.
Not really a mistake. It was Tucker who made the Twilight Zone reference, not something they showed in the flashback to 1957.
@17 Winslow AZ: Thanks for correcting me. It’s been about three years since I’ve watched any Enterprise episodes. By the way, this is my favorite episode of the series.
This episode has a special place in my heart. I like when things are smaller and story is more contained and characters are newly introduced and developed. Not everything has to be about saving the galaxy and sometimes I just want to watch a self contained episode for the the week that still enriches the lore or the series. There is so much on this episode about Vulkans and Humans, I love it.
Hey Keith. A question. Not about “Carbon Creek”, which is an episode I’ve always really liked. But about the “Zorro’s Exploits” book you mention in you sig above. I’m wondering, *is* it still on schedule for this month (June) release? I still can’t find anything about it on either Amazon or the publisher’s own website. (I’m looking forward to it.)
David Young
“Two Vulcans stroll into a bar, hustle a few games of pool and walk out with an armload of TV dinners? It sounds like an old episode of The Twilight Zone!”
This is rather charming. Whimsical but charming. T’Mir seems to have been lumbered with her own Archer in the pro-human Mestrel, who keeps doing things that seem like a good idea at the time with her ultimately turning out to be not so above it all much like her great-grandaughter. It’s a shame we don’t see more of the regulars, since seeing Archer, T’Pol and Tucker relaxing in a social situation is quite entertaining as well. The Carbon Creek locals are ciphers to a degree but work in spite of it. Even the stuffy Stron is willing to keep his word to a lonely local.
After we made it through the first season with most of the regulars in every episode, we suddenly get one that only features Scott Bakula, Jolene Blalock and Connor Trineer, all of whom will maintain 100% records. (That makes it the first non-appearance for Reed, Mayweather and Sato, excluding Mayweather’s voice only appearance in “Shuttlepod One”.) Yes, it seems two months have passed during and after the preceding two-parter. (Maybe getting Enterprise back into space wasn’t as straightforward as they made it look?) Archer says the previous record for a Vulcan on a human ship was two weeks and T’Pol corrects him to ten days… which is odd, since in “Shadows of P’Jem” Phlox remarked all previous Vulcans had lasted no more than a few weeks and she didn’t correct him! Interesting to hear the Vulcans and Tellarites were already in contact in the 20th century…
I understand when the season was first shown in the UK on satellite, Sky considered this a weak second episode so dropped it back in the running order and aired “Minefield” and “Dead Stop” first. (Channel 4 used the correct running order.)
At least one contemporary review interpreted the final scene as meaning it was T’Pol herself who visited Earth in the 1950s. I can’t say that occurred to me, and it’s ruled out by T’Pol’s age being revealed as considerably younger in Season 3.
There was a VHS release..?
Carbon Creek exemplifies a lot of the early second season of ENT. Some potentially good ideas that are never fully realized, and an apparent feeling of fatigue throughout. Obviously franchise fatigue is not the right word, but for Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, you can tell the pressure is getting to them. After doing this for over a decade (over 15 for Berman), I can understand when even the opening episode feels like it could have been great had they given just a bit more effort.
The whole college thing reminds me of how Kirk and Spock were easily able to make a living while waiting for McCoy on City on the Edge of Forever, in the midst of depression era, of all things! Just a little Google research would have given the post-Sputnik era a bit more credibility. And maybe it’s just me, but there’s no bigger cliché than the miners under poor working conditions plot – overused to death. Maybe once someone would do a mine story that wasn’t so black and white – acknowledge the labor and health problems while also giving it a little nuance.
Thankfully, both Blalock and the guest cast give enough life and gravitas to these Vulcans. Casting Boehmer was a sure thing, especially after his phenomenal turn as One on VOY‘s Drone. And I like that the episode plays around with the idea that T’Pol could have made up some of the story for Archer and Tucker. Clearly, a year spent on the ship made T’Pol absorb some human trolling skills.
If anything, I’m impressed with James A. Contner’s ability to multitask. Now I understand how he was able to do this and the upcoming Minefield back to back – Kroeker directed Shockwave II in-between. And not only Contner pulled off five episodes this season alone, he was also knee-deep occupied with the Joss Whedon shows at the same time, directing Buffy, Angel and Firefly. That is Rob Bowman-level of commitment.
Interestingly enough, the other credited writer – besides Chris Black – is Dan O’Shannon. He’s known mainly for sitcoms. I guess they wanted a fresh pair of eyes on this story – from someone who didn’t come from genre or sci-fi. At this point, Trek had pretty much stopped Michael Piller’s old practice of buying stories and pitches from anyone, and did most episodes in-house, but still giving a couple of freelancers each season a shot.
@3/Christopher: And yes, you can tell the music starts gaining ground once again at this point on Trek. One of the few good things about this season.
I liked this episode; sometimes Trek does character-centered stories very well and this is one of them. Not a lot of technobabble or action, but a nice story like a quiet drink after dinner.
In addition to the already noted historical inaccuracies, no one noticed that the Vulcans looked odd. Their skin isn’t exactly a normal shade for a human. And I was never convinced that simply combing your hair over your ears would be sufficient to hide them, especially with how short T’Pol’s hair is.
For several years, I have been holding onto a theory that the entire Trekverse is set in an alternate time line which has many points of similarity, but with interesting divergences from OTL.
For example, three major factors not found in OTL are necessary for the events in TOS, all of them by 1996 at the latest.
1) Earlier development of genetics (The Eugenics Wars).
2) More rapids development of spaceflight technology (Khan’s stealing of the DY-100).
3) Much faster development of cryogenics (The cold sleep chambers on the DY-100, and in the TNG episode The Neutral Zone.)
There are other little matters, such as the Millennium Tower not being built on schedule…
So – – perhaps T’Pol did introduce Velcro to Earth after all, and the baseball season was different in that TL also, and (many other things.)
Anyway, that’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.
I’m going against the grain and am going to say this is one of the best episodes of ENTERPRISE period.
“Carbon Creek” succeeds because it’s a ridiculous premise and is all the more fun for it. It’s up there with “A PIECE OF THE ACTION” and other comedy episodes of Star Trek. The fact the Vulcans do act like the kind of aliens that would be period appropriate aliens on television with their goofball antics and overly serious demeanor.
Season One of ENT just didn’t have that many memorable episodes for me and the ones I do remember are usually for bad reasons (“Why is Archer helping the people torturing his crew against his people’s allies?” “Phlox and genocide” “Why is there an episode devoted to the crew’s failed attempt to get laid?”) I think “DETAINED” is the only really great episode of Season One and this is a strong starter.
I don’t mind the alternate history element of velcro being created by someone other than its actual inventor but I also believe that T’Pol is “sprucing up” her story with a lot of humor for her audience. Trip and Archer don’t seem to realize that Vulcans have GLORIOUS senses of humor but Spock was always taking the **** and sometimes fans don’t get it.
It’s why “Only Nixon can go to China” is an old Vulcan proverb.
I also fully believe that this episode got a well-deserved shout-out in Picard even if the timing doesn’t quite work out.
David Young: The current plan is to have it out around the end of June, yes, pending final approval of everything by Zorro Productions inc.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Obviously not genetically engineered, but IF we assume that the events of the Eugenics Wars (leading to WW3) took place in the “background”, several current and recent rulers would be suitable stand ins for Khan and his followers.
I would say in general though that the entire Trek timeline is another quantum reality. The events are similar to our timeline (at least to the mid 20th century but then begin to show a greater divergence. Suppose part of that divergence was NASA funding NOT being slashed post Apollo and that assorted administrations kept to the goals set in the late 1960’s. Imagine IF not only did we have the Shuttle as an orbital SUV, but that we had successors to the Saturn V capable to establishing a Lunar Base and landing a crew on Mars by the end of the 20th Century. Imagine that circa 2020 NASA/Space X/ULA etc had developed a functional Nuclear propulsion system and that due to better investment in research Fusion power was on the cusp of being commercially viable. The timing obviously is off, but imagine a group of deposed rulers being put into cryogenic suspension and being launched into deep space in a ship capable of reaching .01c. The odds of reaching a habitable planet would have been close to 0, but assuming such a ship had the proper equipment, it could easily have reached deep into the Juniper Belt or even Scattered Disc in a matter of a year or two.
As far a a Baseball game being on the radio in October 1957, remember that media had considerably more local programming in the 1950’s than today. What IF the local mines had a Fall Baseball league (amateur to semi pro) and that’s what was broadcast.
With Velcro, given how Vulcans had a tendency to keep events from Humans (at least up the the events in Season 4 of Enterprise) IS it Possible that Vulcans had previously visited Earth (Europe) and provided the Swiss researcher the concept to create Velcro? Perhaps “Mestral” was an Alias chosen to pay respect to the Swiss researcher.
A fun episode, the only thing that annoyed me is that yet again the aliens landed in USA. Is there a Trek episode that takes place in Earth’s past and the action does not take place in the USA? It’s a contrived coincidence that annoyed me much more than the velcro thing (and I had no idea that the baseball game was a plot hole, but as someone said, maybe they are listening to a very local game?)
I would like to agree that T’Mir selling a human something Humanity had already invented makes perfect sense – especially if the human in question is happily ignorant of the fact he won’t be able to patent this invention – since it’s precisely the sort of grey area I would expect a Vulcan honouring their noninterference directive (while working around it) to exploit.
Also, @5. o.m. I definitely got the impression that Stron’s most regular customer was consistently disappointed by his failure to really fix her plumbing … (and Stron being completely oblivious makes it all the more amusing; one can only wonder if T’Mir and Mestral did notice this particular ship being sunk without a trace).
@9. ChristopherLBennett: I can practically hear the rattle of a thousand keyboards as Fan Fiction pounces on that two month gap!
… also, is it just me or does anyone else wonder what the record for the longest period of service by a human on a Vulcan ship might be? (It amuses me to imagine that it would be much, much longer than a few weeks, if only because one gets the mental image of Vulcan response to such casual adaptability being something between “Well of course it’s easier to adapt to a properly-run starship” “Must do better”* and “We may be somewhat set in our ways”).
*That humans are able to stick it out longer on Vulcan vessels than vice versa doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll distinguish themselves to any remarkable degree.
Also, if I may drift a little into a distinct STAR TREK topic, might I please ask if any contributors could remind me of blue-skinned, preferably Federation or Federation-adjacent species that I may have forgotten? (I’ve been amusing myself with the mental image of a Starfleet vessel on which a solitary human stands out to an even greater degree than Mr Spock did on NCC-1701 and making the vast majority of the crew ‘Blue Fleet’ struck me as the best way to do so).
I remember the Andorians, the Betelgeusians, the Bolians and at least some Orions but vaguely recalled at least one other, un-named species (from crowd scenes in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY) and would appreciate a reminder of any other accidental omissions.
Thank You in advance for your consideration.
@32- The Benzites are kinda blueish.
If I ever do cosplay, it’s going to be these Vulcan space ship crew uniforms – LOVE THEM.
C’mon – the line about the Three Stooges was fun.
And re Picard and the Vulcan incident there … I thought that was a different timeline? And if so it made sense that Vulcan encounters happened in both timelines but not exactly the same way.
@34/Antipodenaut: “And re Picard and the Vulcan incident there … I thought that was a different timeline?”
That’s what the producers claimed in interviews, but it doesn’t hold up in-story, because Guinan’s lines at the end establish that the timeline she knows developed directly from the events of the season, and that the photo of Rios in the past was sitting there in her bar the whole time, just unnoticed by Picard. And if that were an alteration from the original timeline, Guinan would sense it and let Picard know, as she did in “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Besides, the whole premise of the season was that they had to prevent the upcoming event that would change the timeline, and that makes no sense if the timeline has already changed.
@6 — I have exactly that same suspicion. I felt a little sick reading that paragraph, actually.
23. cap-mjb
> There was a VHS release..?
I thought only season 1 of Enterprise was released on VHS
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Enterprise_(VHS)
It is possible there is some other release or collection I’ve overlooked, but it seems more likely that someone at Memory Alpha wrote ~and VHS~ by mistake.
Dan O’Shannon was producing Frasier at the time which was also still filming at Paramount when Enterprise started, and he was friends with Brannon Braga and pitched him the story idea, which Braga brought to Berman. Chris Black wrote the teleplay.
The DVD includes a commentary which I haven’t been able to borrow but writer Chris Black also did a commentary in 2022 for the podcast “Inglorious Treksperts Briefing Room” which I have listened to.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/treksperts-briefing-room/id1552937601
There is a whole lot of preamble, the episode commentary doesn’t begin properly until about 14 minutes into the podcast.
My mistake on the VHS thing….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
While I don’t watch all the rewatches with Keith (I’m a bad wife, yes, in this. I’m not a masochist.— At least not anymore.) I did watch Carbon Creek with him, and partly remembered information sent me into a deep dive research frenzy. (FYI, my paternal grandfather was a foreman in a central Pennsylvania mine in the 20-30s.) So the numbers Keith states above are based on Dept of Labor records for PA mining jobs – and they’d have been union jobs (see my comment about my grandfather above, and the 1920s-30s? yeah, that). Also, from the lists of job types I found there, the positions would have been far more automated than the pick/shovel scenes we saw here.
Housing information comes from historical records from the Dept of Housing and Urban Development referencing PA rental costs (2 bedroom apart, 1960, $60-70 a month. Keith rounded up). Finally 1957 was still a time where 1 income could pay for a family of 4, and these three give us effectively 2.5 incomes and a frugal lifestyle. They’d have a wad of cash after being there a couple months.
It was also a time where you could put yourself through college working a job MIT undergrad in 1957 was 800 a semester, according to their records. On top of that the only partial type scholarships that existed would have clearly been community based, not school based (Send the employees kid to school type thing), we just don’t know enough from the script. Because if it were school based, Jack would have had a full ride, either merit – remember – he’s so smart! – and/or need – they are so poor they’re crowd funding. Partial scholarships became the thing when tuition skyrocketed (and my dive shows that they happened more likely for sports scholarships than academic. Partial scholarships were offered for need were ‘top off’ types – bringing the costs down enough so that the student could attend. Thing is, we know from the costs and the incomes at the time – and all the anecdotal comments from our parents, you could put yourself through college while working a job (my dad did, Drexel Tech – now University, at this same point in time. So this concept – which works in 2002, just doesn’t work for 1957. Did anyone think to ask their parents?
Perhaps we’re just all more aware of that fact than in 2002, there are far fewer people saying ‘well, I paid my way through college, you should be able to too!”.
Pennsylvania mining regions were the central to north east 20% and the south west 15% or so of the state. Since Pittsburgh is a quick train ride away, we should peg “Carbon City” as most likely SE PA. Which leads to my next thing.
Frozen (TV) dinners. While invented in the 20ss by Birdseye, and marketed by Maxon to airlines in the 40s. They weren’t something you could buy in a grocery store until 1954 – when Swanson – out of Pittsburgh, started to do it. And here’s where my research dive got amusingly surreal. I suggest you google the history of TV dinners and find out just WHY Swanson decided to market TV dinners starting in 1954.
A nice enough little diversion that serves to highlight just how different a medium television was 20 years ago.
Following up a “tension” episode, especially the conclusion of a cliffhanger, with something fluffy is what you do when you’re a once-a-week broadcast aiming to make your money back in syndication.
Now, in the streaming era of binge watching, shows get written differently. Want to ratchet up the tension across an entire (usually shorter) season? You no longer have to worry about them getting distracted as it drags on into its ninth week because viewers will mash the “next episode” button and finish it in a single weekend. You don’t have to plan for episodes being shown out of order, or even out of season. Even weekly broadcast TV is written with the streaming aftermarket in mind, versus the syndication one.
Most people were also less terminally online, and though theoretically, all possible information like “who invented velcro” and “what baseball games were being broadcast on PA radio in October 1957”, most of us didn’t want to spend the time waiting for the page to load to bother, especially when we had to download a PDF to do a homework assignment and were on gol-danged dial-up. This doesn’t excuse the writers who were being paid to write a show, but most fans weren’t as obsessed with reality and plot-holes in a fluff episode of something they watched once a week, if Lindsay didn’t have soccer practice. (I will also say that as they were writing for a franchise rather known for its obsessive fans, the should have taken a little more care… but the network directive could well have been: “the viewers don’t care about that crap, now throw in something like a scene where we can see she’s naked, but remember we’re network prime-time here.”)
So, looked at in the standard of the weekly network broadcast schedule in a landscape where home-video was barely a thing (certainly not where all the $$ comes in) and the idea of someone sitting down and just watching an entire season all at once over the internet could be something out of Trek, it’s a perfectly fine “rest” episode after a cliffhanger. And surprisingly, it’s a showcase for Blalock as opposed to Bakula or Trineer which… honestly was a nice change to how things normally get done. The kind of thing you want when you’re tired and don’t want to think too much, and are just an average member of the lowest common denominator demographic, versus a hyperconnected member of one of the longest running, detail-obsessed fandoms in history (I will leave it to you to decide whether I mean Star Trek or baseball
). Could have been better? Sure. Could have also been a lot worse.
41.
Honestly, all what you describe makes me nostalgic for those days. If modern TV gets any more ‘prestigious’ I’m gonna have to stop watching.
@33. Cuttlefishbenjamin: Ah-ha! Thank You most kindly for the reminder, that would be an obvious and embarrassing omission.
@41 / Malevolentpixie – To be fair, Strange New Worlds just followed up a tense battle episode with a frivolous breather episode a couple of weeks ago.
Really liked this episode. The only episode in this series that I have on my computer. Stopped watching midway into the first season. Was just too unbearable. Reading some of the reviews though, I’ve earmarked a few to watch in the future.
In my hippie days back in the late 60’s I rode my motorcycle coast to coast a few times. The nicest people were in these small communities in Pennsylvania. That’s one reason why I really liked this episode. Very accepting of outsiders. I could relate to the characters.
In the UK I got ADSL for my house in 2000 I think it was. At the time it was a little bit unusual and expensive and most people had dial up. Businesses often had ISDN which is not really broadband but was faster than 56k. I think it used 2 dedicated phone lines or something.
The point is that by the time they were writing this episode businesses had pretty decent internet, yes it was a lot slower than now but Web sites used less bandwidth too. Anyone writing for a living would be foolish not to have had web access at this time for research.
@46/Pango: Most TV and movie studios have their own research departments. It’s not dependent on writers doing their own research, whether online or the old-fashioned way through encyclopedias and libraries; they actually pay people to check facts for a living. (That’s also part of a copyeditor’s job in prose.) But producers are under no obligation to actually take the advice of the research department, as the needs of the story are valued more than strict accuracy. (For instance, Kellam De Forest research recommended to Gene Roddenberry that he name his Eugenics Wars superman Govind Bahadur Singh if he wanted an authentic Sikh name, but he went with Khan Noonien Singh instead.)
@44 jaimebabb — I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, especially on shows harkening back to the non-streaming days. Rather that back in those days you were far less likely to have a season’s worth of episodes where you didn’t get a break. But on the whole, things have changed. The aim of a series now is generally different (shorter seasons and generally count on about 3 max) which changes the way stories get told.
@46 Pango — I didn’t say the writers didn’t have good internet, but the state of things in the UK is not like the US or Canada when it comes to that, and certainly wasn’t at the beginning of the century. Anywhere outside a major city, you couldn’t (hell, often still can’t) get service that was fast, reliable, or anything the average person could afford. I know, because I was one of those people trying to download a simple document on dial-up. Even now, in a lot of places you’re spending an arm and a leg for limited cellular or satellite service that has a tendency to drop out if the weather gets even slightly sketchy. In other words, the average audience member wasn’t expected to care enough and really wasn’t as online. The average viewer consumed TV differently.
Should they have done better research? Sure — but there were and are a lot of other shows that had bigger research fails. They were chasing a wider audience that didn’t have the bandwidth (figuratively or literally) to go down the rabbit hole of the exact Sputnik launch date, the invention of Velcro and the contemporary World Series and who the players were. Plus, it’s a story, not a history text. But that is another thing that has changed, and why I say the television of today is a different medium than the one of 20 years ago: today, you must write with an audience in mind that can hit pause and look up the most trivial of details. That can instantly rewind and catch the thing they missed first time through. 20 years ago, most of us weren’t doing that. And the network wasn’t about to waste time and money on the minority that did.
I enjoyed this one. Sure, there were innaccuracies and anachronisms, but it was just a bit of fun.
@48/Malevolentpixy: It’s so bizarre to me how people today assume it was impossible for ordinary people to research anything before the internet. We had multi-volume encyclopedias on our bookshelves. We had bookshelves. We had magazine subscriptions. We had library cards. We could call up librarians and ask them to find things out for us, and they would, because that was part of their job. Schoolteachers and college professors were also happy to help out when people had questions.
@50 ChristopherLBennett I was in Library School at that time. I was also the only person (for the first year, at least) to have my own laptop in class and know how to access the wi-fi. I was the weird one who found classification intuitive — even those already employed in the library system thought that was a bit much.
Can do the research and be bothered to do the research are two different things. And, like I said, the expectation of the writers (at least) and the higher-ups (more likely) was that the audience wasn’t going to. Hell, it’s entirely possible somebody did point out the anachronism only to be told “who gives a fuck?”
And honestly, to me, these research fails pale next to some more modern shows’ depictions of things like hacking, video games or message boards.
I mean, face it. The only reason we’re arguing about a 20 year old show is we’re all slightly obsessive nerds here. I don’t think any of us quite belong in the bucket labeled “average”.
@50 Your post makes me betray my age, as my undergrad and law school theses were both researched very old school, pre Internet.. I remember how rewarding, almost magical, it felt to find just the right source for my arguments, buried in a book or periodical deep in the bowels of the library, smelling like old paper. The Internet is a marvelous tool. But, candidly, I don’t believe anyone researching a topic these days will ever feel the thrill that I did a finding just the right source in a flourescent-lit corner of a library just before closing at midnight
KRAD: $800 wasn’t as (comparatively) small an amount in the 1950s as it sounds today. I googled the inflation adjustment against now, and got these figures: “800 in 1957 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $8,321.59 today, an increase of $7,521.59 over 65 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 3.67% per year between 1957 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 940.20%.”
@39/krad: Thanks for confirming I’m not going insane! I know nothing past Season 1 was released on VHS in the UK (and it seems as though the US might not even have got that?). I did wonder if it was released elsewhere. There was a very lethargic re-release of TNG over here, which started to mark the 10th anniversary but hadn’t got past Season 5 by 2002 at which point the market had collapsed and they gave up: I stumbled across an Italian VHS tape from Season 7 on eBay once which was clearly a continuous of that range, which the same cover design and format.
Don S.: I didn’t say it was a small amount, and please read the entire paragraph. My point isn’t that it was inexpensive, my point is that Mestral, Stron, and T’Mir’s earnings over six months could easily have covered it, given what plumbers and miners made in Pennsylvania at the time, and given that they were unlikely to have been profligate spenders generally.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love this episode. It is amusing, nostalgic, charming, and a bit of fun.
It is somewhat unfortunate that it entirely inconsequential, ignores the crew of the Enterprise, does nothing to move the show forward, or develop the characters, and is never mentioned again. Even when Enterprise was good it was disappointing.
Bob: I’d argue that it does illuminate the character of T’Pol.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
You could argue that I suppose, I think that’s a generous interpretation. Sometimes it seemed like maybe T’Pol was different from other Vulcans, but I don’t think the show ever explained it. There were theories (or possibly unused script proposal I read about somewhere) that maybe T’Pol father dead father wasn’t really dead and secretly a Romulan.
@58/Bob: Romulans are biologically the same species as Vulcans; aside from the odd makeup redesign, the differences between them should be strictly cultural, since they diverged only 2000 years ago, hardly enough for any significant evolution to occur. So genetically, a Vulcan ancestor vs. a Romulan one should make no difference. That’s why The Wrath of Khan cut out the scripted business about Saavik being more emotional because she was half-Romulan — because they realized it doesn’t work that way, that Vulcan control is learned, not biological. (And why Vonda McIntyre’s novelization kept the half-Romulan origin but added the idea of Saavik growing up feral on an abandoned colony, making her emotionality a function of nurture rather than nature.)
@58/Bob: Romulans are biologically the same species as Vulcans
Yeah, I know. Anyhow it never happened so it is moot, but it is not like Star Trek hasn’t ever ignored the science for the sake of the story. My recollection is vague, but I think it was writer Mike Sussman who suggested doing something with T’Pols father but it was one of many ideas the producers didn’t go for.
I don’t know if you guys have checked this out yet, but there are cut scenes on YouTube that show Trip, John and T’Pol siding in the Captain’s Mess just slurring, sloppy drunk. They’re hilarious, and I recommend you check them out,
I fall into the always loved this episode, and wasn’t looking for the details to nitpick it, though the Velcro thing I agree was unnecessary.
It was a very wholesome episode, and Jolene as usual knocked it out of the park.T’Mir and Jack’s friendship was very heartwarming to me, she believed in Jack and through him was introduced to humanity’s possibilities.
I have fond memories of this episode. My daughters (now 33 and 30) do as well. You can say that “Enterprise” was their ST series. While I watched TOS and continued from there.
We moved to Pennsylvania in ‘96, so the location, in their mind, made this episode special.
I can overlook some of historical mistakes.
It still gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. (The novels mentioned did as well)
And regarding research. Yeah…how did we manage all those without the internet? Or using slide rules! Retired librarian here. Way back when, I tried to teach my kids to use the right tool for the job. I would have called Cooperstown and the patent office. Or checked my set of encyclopedias.
sometimes a phone call to the right person is still quicker than google. (And perhaps more accurate)
The Velcro and baseball gaffes are well noted, but I’m more bothered by the fact that T’Mir and Mestral were able to find all the clothes they needed—in the right sizes, no less!—in a single back yard. Were those pumps she stole also drying on the clothesline?
From the rewatch: “Frozen TV dinners in 1957 would have had meat in them. There is no explanation as to why the Vulcans, who are vegetarians (Stron and T’Mir roundly reject Mestral’s proposal that they eat a deer they encounter in the woods), eat them. (Maybe they just ate the side veggies and threw the meat out?)”
Having had to choke down countless entrees of this particular delicacy back in the day, I would feel confident in suggesting that the Vulcans did not recognize whatever was in that tray as meat.
fullyfunctional: You raise an excellent point……..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Am I going batty? My memory of this episode was that the town found out the Vulcans were aliens but decided to keep it a secret to protect them.
@67/rwmg: Maybe you’re conflating it in your memory with some other story, but I can’t think of one like that.
@67/68: Maybe “Spirit Folk” at a pinch?
rwmg: Your memory, obviously, is faulty. The Vulcans kept themselves a secret.
As to whether or not you’re going batty, that’s between you and your medical professionals…. *wry grin*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@69 I think I would rather accept battiness as an explanation rather than “Spirt Folk” having an effect on my subconscious.
rwmg: That is a reasonable conclusion, yes, as “Spirit Folk” should never be on one’s mind for longer than it takes to say, “Holy crap, that episode sucked!”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Interesting about the nitpicks…for me not knowing too much about 50s US, I don’t even understand the complaints. :D The story worked, i appreciate that again we have a cute story told without huge risks and dangers (except for the landing at the beginning of the story of course), i really have no complaints about it. Nothing amazing, but nothing bad either.
This was on last night and coming here, I’m surprised to see the criticisms about historical accuracy.
This is because I think @Cybersnark is on to something — I would posit that while the basic structure is true, T’Pol made most of this story up. I don’t think either Stron or Mestral were real. It’s just a little too coincidental to me that there were three Vulcans, one basically T’Pol, a second a pure Vulcan who could take or leave the humans entirely, and a third who came to like humans so much he chose to live his remaining years on Earth (yet leaving no trace).
These weren’t real people, they were representations of different parts of T’Mir’s personality, almost like a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. I like to think she spent some time in Carbon Creek in the 1950s, maybe developed a thing with a super bright local college kid, helped him out, then returned to Vulcan but left part of her heart on Earth, and her memories came down to T’Pol. T’Pol tells the story to Trip and Archer and gets the facts wrong because a) they’re irrelevant and b) she’s talking about T’Mir only.
Yeah, just a delightful episode for the most part. It’s quite possible that not all of T’Pol’s story was true though. She said she told them a story, implying it was not true. So it could have had embellishments, which is what I was going with even before I read the review and all of KRad’s research (possibly I came to this because I have a distaste for those Forest Gumpian plots). Now, why T’Pol would make stuff up, I have no idea. Vulcans do show wimsy sometimes though, and she had been imbibing.
Of course, Vulcans lie throughout the episode, so it’s even possible T’Pol thought she was telling the truth, but the story told to her was a lie.
It was nothing that hadn’t been done before, but I thought the dramatic points were well handled. The Vulcan getting attached to humanity was a nice touch, and at least they didn’t have it turn truly romantic.